


Watchpoint: Tromso

by ahimsabitches



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Building a Watchpoint, F/M, Fluff, Mei is so literal, Mistletoe, Norway - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-30
Updated: 2016-12-30
Packaged: 2018-09-13 11:31:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9121570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ahimsabitches/pseuds/ahimsabitches
Summary: This is a gift fic for a dear friend on Tumblr. Jamie visits Mei at the Watchpoint she's building in the mountains of Norway.





	

Mei stood with her back to the wind and her face to the sun and breathed in the sweeping view around her.

The ridge of the snowless mountain marched off to her left. Stunted shrubs with stubborn dark green leaves hunkered between rocks furred with lichen in every color. To her right rose the true peak of the mountain, a couple hundred feet higher than her current vantage point. She wouldn’t climb all the way up there yet. She would wait until the Watchpoint was completely finished.

Her eyes rolled down the parabolic mountainside, a patchwork of gray stone, cloudy green shrubs, yellow and red and gray and purple lichen and thin blackbrown scrubsoil, to the half-skeleton of the Watchpoint pressed like a nervous child against the skirt of the mountain. It was a small building, squat and square, hewn from the motherstone around it. Wooden struts stuck out of its eastern end like ribs. It would be another few months before it was finished. Construction was slow because most of the materials had to be shipped up the fjord to her. The nearest human settlement was twenty miles downriver.

Beyond the fledgling Watchpoint, the glacial lake yawned in a deep blue circle. The tail of the fjord curved left with the mountain ridge, turning the lake into a backwards Q. Mountains rose around and across the lake, and Mei marked with idle amusement the ancient scars the glaciers had made in their slow, relentless advances and retreats. Mei stood just atop the high-tide line. Below her and around the arc of the mountains, the glaciers had seemed to scoop rocks away in great clawed handfuls, leaving sheer cliff faces that dropped precipitously down to the lake. They continued to drop, she knew, below the surface of the lake for a few hundred feet at least. She hadn’t sounded the full blue depths yet, but as soon as she had all her equipment, she would.

The eternal wind, bitter and snarling now that it was winter, galloped around the bowl of the lake and into the inverted bowl of the sky, cloudless and boomingly blue. It whipped the fur of her hood against her cheeks. And she loved it like a brother.

With a lungful of air scented with high mountain and impending snow, she turned her booted steps down the slope toward the Watchpoint. It was slow going. The waist-high shrubs grabbed at her with gnarled fingers and the rocky topsoil hid a thin scrim of ice—refrozen meltwater from the last snow.

“Too long ago,” she murmured to herself, her focus on her feet and her brows furrowing with concern and the effort of keeping herself from skidding down the mountain on her butt.

This part of Norway never got snow in any great quantities, but it should have been drifted in hollows and definitely should have covered the tops of her boots at the mountain peak. It was late December, and if it didn’t start snowing in earnest, there wouldn’t be enough runoff from this mountain range and the taller ones to the east to keep the glacial lake and others like it full, and if they ran dry, the fjords fed by them…and all the life that depended on them…

“Hey Snowball!”

The strident voice sliced the uncanny quiet—now that she was out of the worst of the wind—in half and Mei flung her head up so quickly it unbalanced her. Her feet slid out from under her and she landed with a crunch of ice and a yelp. She slid a few feet before she was able to catch hold of a dormant rosebay bush.

Jamie— _Jamie? Here?_ —giggled. “Sorry ‘about that, love! Y’need help?”

Mei muttered to herself in Mandarin and rose huffily, dusting the dirt and ice and broken branches off her parka. “No thank you, Jamie!”

He stood on the small dock next to the Watchpoint, grinning his bright yellow grin in nothing but his shorts, shabby black boots, red gloves, a red-and-green striped scarf, and a red hat with white trim and a white pom on the end. The bearded pilot of the boat that had gotten him here stood next to him, eyes all but gone in pockets of crowsfooted flesh and hands stuck in the top of his winter bib.

“ _Tusen takk,_ ” she called to the captain as she skidded down the last few feet of the hill in a scree of dislodged branches and icy rocks. “Thank you so much,” she said again. “I hope he wasn’t too much trouble.”

The pilot remained as he was, nothing of expression between the blonde-grey bush of his beard and his hooded eyes. Then he nodded once and turned to his boat. The engine blatted grumpily and the boat trundled back the way it had come, echoes of the engine farting up and down the fjord.

Mei rounded on Jamie and stuck her gloved fists on her hips. “Jamie, what are you _doing_ here? And _where is your coat?_ ”

“Merry Christmas to you too, Snowball,” Jamie said, patting her fur-lined hood.

“I don’t celebrate Christmas.”

“Neither do I, but that bloke in the chest-high galoshes looked in need of some company. So I rode with him for a bit.”

The only company Mei had ever known Arne the boat pilot to need or want was that of his wooden troll carvings. She hiked a thick brown eyebrow at Jamie. His grin, set in a broad halfmoon below sharp golden eyes and hair to match, slowly filled her with warm yellow summer.

She’d met him in summer, and she’d left him behind in summer. He lived in summer, _was_ summer, the kind of summer that scorched you with its kisses, the kind of summer that shook you awake early and kept you out late, that exhausted you and sent you to bed with a sweet, lovely ache in your bones. The kind of summer that made you sweat and curse and burn and then forget you ever hurt when it caressed you with breezy-cool fingers.

Mei sighed and stepped into Jamie’s open arms. She wrapped her arms around his slim waist and squeezed. The scent of Australian Outback—sunburned sand and ozone—he carried with him filled her lungs and made her heart rabbit-kick her ribs.

“I missed you,” she murmured into his chest.  The muscles beneath his chilled skin twitched as he tightened his embrace.

“Missed ya too, Snowball,” he said, and suddenly the ground dropped from beneath her. She yelped alarm as Jamie tossed her over his shoulder and carried her into the half-born Watchpoint.

As if he knew where he was going, he carried her through the door from the unfinished main lab to the only finished part of the Watchpoint: the living area.  It was sparsely furnished and would be rustic compared to the lab. The outer wall was mortared stone, but the inner walls were seasoned wood. Jamie plunked her down in the soft chair in front of the fire she’d left burning, and moved into the little kitchen attached to the living area.

“Nice place y’got here,” he said, rummaging in the cabinet above the washbasin. “Where’s yer tea?”

Mei blinked and then scrambled out of the chair. In one loping step, he met her at the edge of the kitchen. She pulled up short to keep from colliding with him.

“What?”

Jamie’s golden eyes flicked upward. She glanced up. Over his head, pinched between the thumb and first finger of his steel hand was a small bunch of foliage with white berries and thick teardrop-shaped leaves. She narrowed her eyes, flipping through her mental list.

“ _Viscum album,_ ” she said and looked at him. Why had he brought _that_ here? It wasn’t native, as far as she knew, and parasitic to boot. Not that there was much up at this altitude for it to attach to, but she misliked it anyway. Jamie kept on smiling.

“Mistletoe,” he said, and waggled his eyebrows.

“Yes, that’s the common name. Where did you get it? Surely not here.”

“Are ya serious, Snowball? You don’t know what mistletoe is for?”

What it was _for?_ Mei blinked, confusion humming in her like a swarm of gnats. “…No?”

Jamie chuckled, pushed her hood back, leaned in, and kissed her.

She froze for a moment, then melted against him. Summer bloomed between her heart and her stomach and heated her through. A fierce, giddy thunderstorm whirled in her mind and sent shivers of electricity up and down her spine. She clung to him. He cupped the back of her head with his living hand and locked his steel arm around her waist, drawing her upward.

His lips were soft and still chilled from the outside. She tasted summer and mikysweet boba in his mouth. Of course. Only he could find boba in midwinter Norway. She chuckled into the kiss and Jamie took it as encouragement, tightening his grip. She let him even when his steel arm compressed her lungs. She let him, and loved it.

Mistletoe, she learned, was for kissing.

Her feet eventually found the ground again, but her senses remained in a pleasant summery haze for a while. She was dimly aware of Jamie bustling around her, peeling her out of her parka, placing a mug of something warm and fragrant in her hands.

Finally her eyes connected to her brain, and she stood at the window beside the fire. Jamie stood behind her, his arms gently slung around her waist. She blinked. The sky outside had dimmed from a sonic blue boom to a rolling grey ocean. Fat white flakes danced lazily to earth.

Mei smiled and sipped her tea, the smile turning sour for just a moment. Jamie always made his tea _strong_. But that was him, and she wouldn’t trade it. She sighed, leaned into his lanky warmth and watched the snow pile on top of the shrubs like a cat curling up to sleep.

“ _It will always be summer where you are,”_ she told him in Mandarin.

“What was that, Snowball?”

“Learn my language and you’ll find out,” she teased gently, reaching up to squeeze the little white ball on the end of his hat.

“Much better chance o’ me thrashin’ this powder when it gets deep enough,” he said, resting his chin on the top of her head.

“It doesn’t get deep enough to ski or snowboard here, Jamie.”

“Challenge bloody accepted.”

“I look forward to watching you hit a rock and roll all the way down the mountain.”

“And I look for’ard to th’ trip.”

“Just wear a coat, please?”

“A’roight, Snowball.”


End file.
